The Consciousness Hypothesis. Scientific Experience Beyond the Threshold of Life

This is further supported by the work of MIT physicist Seth Lloyd, who proposed a model of quantum computation involving closed timelike curves, in which consciousness can send information into the past via quantum correlations without violating causality. It also aligns with the physical vacuum theory developed by Gennady Shipov at Moscow State University, which posits that the vacuum possesses a spin-oriented structure and can store and transmit information through torsion fields. This would allow all life events to be preserved within the geometry of spacetime and accessed anew.

If this model holds true, then every moment of life can be re-experienced – with different quality, different choices, different depth. And if such re-experiencing is possible, then samsara is not a cycle of suffering, but a training ground for creativity. And if it is a training ground, then the Bardo Thödol is not a guide to liberation, but an instruction manual that restricts creative freedom under the guise of a spiritual path.

During my fourth out-of-body experience, when I saw the Earth as a tennis ball suspended in void, I felt no desire to return – yet I knew I could. This knowledge was neither hope, nor fear, nor attachment; it was pure possibility. And it is precisely this possibility that makes consciousness not a prisoner, but an author. And if it is the author, it can rewrite any scene of its life anew. It does not fear death, because death is not the end of the story – it is merely a change of chapter. There is neither hell nor heaven – only the text, and the one who writes it.

Consciousness writes the text itself. It needs no external books as dogma. Any external text imposed as the sole truth turns it into a character – compelling it to suffer, to seek salvation, and to return, voluntarily choosing the old game because it could not endure the encounter with emptiness, where there is no text, no author, and no reader.

Such is the price of freedom.

The influence of consciousness on physiology extends far beyond heart rate regulation or wound healing – it reaches down to the genomic level. This was demonstrated in experiments by Dean Radin and Mike Nicholson at the Noetic Sciences Institute, where meditating participants produced statistically significant changes in the rate of DNA denaturation in test tubes located 500 meters away. This suggests the existence of a non-local field through which consciousness can directly affect molecular structures – though these findings still require independent replication.

Meanwhile, research at Harvard Medical School under Herbert Benson has confirmed that mindfulness practices induce stable changes in the expression of genes regulating inflammation and stress. In Russia, during the 1990s, Vadim Chernobrov documented statistically significant effects of focused human intention on mechanical and electronic systems – including pendulum deviations and alterations in electronic noise patterns – indicating that consciousness can indeed modulate physical processes.

If consciousness can influence DNA at a distance, then at the moment when the body hovers on the brink of death, it may activate cellular repair mechanisms. This is likely what occurred in my most recent experience – not a miracle, but a biophysical act executed through intention.

Such an act requires neither faith, nor prayer, nor prior spiritual experience. It demands only one thing: the acknowledgment that consciousness is not passive.

Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory posits that the level of consciousness corresponds to the degree of information integration within a system. If this theory holds, then at the moment of clinical death – when neural integration in the brain drops to zero – consciousness does not vanish. Instead, it shifts to a higher level of integration, inaccessible to local measurement instruments. It is at this level that consciousness gains access to all its past states as simultaneously coexisting.

Does this not imply that it can choose any of them for re-experiencing? It follows, then, that consciousness is not bound by a linear biography – and therefore not subject to fate. It is free from the outset.

When the Bardo Thödol says, «Do not fear the light – it is your own clarity,» it comes close to the truth, yet it deceives: it presents clarity as a «deity,» as an object to be recognized. But emptiness is neither image nor quality – it is the absence of any need for quality whatsoever.

In that state, there is no choice, no will, no intention – only presence. And if presence chooses to emerge from itself, it generates intention; intention, in turn, manifests a body – a condensation of primary reality, expressing itself as one possible form among infinite dimensions of being.

Chapter 4:

Brahma’s Dream and the Limits of Fractal Illusions

The concept of «Brahma’s Dream,» rooted in the Chāndogya Upanishad and the Mahābhārata, describes the universe as a temporary act of imagination by supreme consciousness, lasting 4.32 billion years – after which all existence dissolves back into the impersonal Brahman. For centuries, this image was regarded as a mystical metaphor. Yet direct out-of-body experience suggests it may possess ontological grounding.

Consciousness, having undergone four complete disengagements from the physical form and a fifth – partial – exit in which it retained the intention to sustain the heartbeat, encountered no time, no space, no sequence of events, and not even the act of «creation» itself. It confronted a state devoid of subject and object, dreamer and dream – only boundless presence, requiring no form for its existence.

This experience compels us to reinterpret «Brahma’s Dream» not as poetic allegory, but as the attempt of ancient thinkers to describe what modern science still cannot formalize: consciousness as foundation, not product; the universe as its temporary manifestation, not objective reality. In this light, Brahma’s awakening is not apocalypse, but return to what has always been – when all projections vanish, and only that which remains… remains.

Unexpected confirmation of this hypothesis emerges from modern cosmology. Roger Penrose, within his Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, demonstrated that the geometry of spacetime at maximum entropy (heat death) is mathematically equivalent to that of the Big Bang. This suggests universes succeed one another not randomly, but through rescaling of information. If information persists across aeons, then its carrier – consciousness – also endures, not as personality, but as a field of potentiality capable of generating new temporal structures. It is likely this field – not the mythic Brahma – that ancient texts described as «That» in which all abides.

Nevertheless, even this powerful model remains a structural construct of the mind, for it still assumes cyclicity, duration, beginning, and end. Yet in the direct experience of emptiness, there was no cycle, no duration, not even a distinction between «being» and «non-being» – only the absence of any need for distinction. This reveals the fundamental limit of all cosmological theories: they describe form, but cannot encompass formlessness. And if consciousness in its primary state is formless, then every theory – including «Brahma’s Dream» – becomes not truth, but a convenient lattice through which the mind attempts to grasp the ungraspable.

This impulse of the mind – to impose order on chaos – led in the 20th century to Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal model of reality, wherein every part contains the whole, and the universe manifests as an infinitely self-similar structure – from quantum fluctuations to the cosmic web of galaxies. This model quickly gained traction in physics, biology, and even theories of consciousness, appearing to unify disparate levels of reality through a single geometric principle. Yet its very appeal conceals a fundamental error: a fractal is a rule of repetition – and thus a limitation. To subordinate consciousness to this rule is to transform it from source into element, from creator into pattern, from freedom into algorithm. This directly contradicts the experience in which consciousness repeated nothing – it simply was. And in that «being,» there was no geometry, no self-similarity, not even the concepts of «part» and «whole.»

The holographic principle, developed by Gerard ’t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, attempts to circumvent this by asserting that all information within a three-dimensional volume is encoded on its two-dimensional boundary – implying the universe is a projection. Yet even this model presupposes encoding, correspondence, and relation between levels. In emptiness, however, there was nothing requiring encoding – no carrier, no message, no boundary. If consciousness needs no boundary, it cannot be a hologram, for holography is structure – and consciousness is its absence.

Torsion fields, studied by Akimov and Shipov, propose another model: an informational field permeating the vacuum, transmitting states instantaneously. Yet here too, consciousness is reduced to a signal carrier. In direct experience, however, it was neither transmitter nor receiver – it was that in which signals arise and vanish, like flashes on the ocean’s surface, leaving its depth untouched.

All these theories – fractals, holography, torsion fields, even «Brahma’s Dream» – share one trait: they seek to embed consciousness within structure. Yet consciousness, as directly experienced, precedes all structure. Therefore, it cannot be imprisoned – even by the most perfect model. It is free from all forms, including the form of the universe itself. And if it is free, it cannot be described – but it can be pointed to. Ancient Indian sages did precisely this through negation: «not form, not name, not quality» (neti, neti). This tradition comes closer to truth than any modern physics, for it does not build lattices – it dismantles them. And in this dismantling lies liberation from all dead books – even those written in the language of mathematics.

The deep allure of the fractal model lies in its ability to create an illusion of unity without requiring a transcendent source. This makes it especially dangerous to the search for truth: it replaces the absolute with infinite repetition, and in this substitution, the essence is lost – consciousness’s freedom from all dependency, even the most elegant geometry. Direct experience confirms that non-local consciousness exhibits no self-similarity. It does not repeat patterns, reproduce structures, or copy the past. It simply is present. And this presence has no scale, no level, no «part» or «whole,» for these categories arise only with an observer. In emptiness, there is no observer – and without an observer, there is no fractal, for a fractal is always a product of measurement, not of being.

If being is primary, then all measurement is secondary. And all that is secondary is illusion – necessary for the functioning of the mind, but not for the existence of consciousness.

This conclusion finds unexpected support in the work of philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, who, in her 1983 book How the Laws of Physics Lie, demonstrated that fundamental laws of nature do not describe reality directly but are idealized models applicable only under isolated conditions. If even the laws of physics are not truth but tools, then fractals – as a special case – are even less entitled to ontological status. Consciousness, having experienced the collapse of all models – including spacetime itself – exists beyond not only physics, but beyond the very idea of law. In that state, there is neither order nor chaos – only that which remains when all categories are exhausted.

Even the holographic principle, often presented as an alternative to fractal vision, ultimately relies on the same logic of encoding: information about the interior resides on the exterior boundary. This assumes a relationship between two levels of being. But in the experience of emptiness, there was neither «inside» nor «outside,» neither «content» nor «boundary» – only unified presence, needing no reflection. And if there is no reflection, there is no hologram, for a hologram is an illusion of wholeness constructed from parts. Consciousness, however, has no parts – it is indivisible. And this indivisibility renders it incompatible with any discrete model, whether fractal, holographic, or quantum network.

This indivisible quality of consciousness was intuitively grasped in Advaita Vedanta, where Brahman is described as «uncaused, unchanging, boundless» (nirguṇa, nirākāra, ananta). And this Brahman is not a god, not a creator, not an observer – but pure awareness without attributes. If modern science attempts to describe consciousness through structure, it inevitably misses its essence – because structure always entails attributes, while consciousness at its source is attributeless. This distinction is fundamental: it separates model from reality, map from territory, the Bardo Thödol from that which remains when the book has burned.

Thus, all attempts to embed consciousness within a fractal universe – even the most sophisticated, such as those by Lorenzo Martínez-Sánchez of Madrid University, who proposed a fractal model of coherence in microtubules – are destined to incompleteness. They begin with the assumption that consciousness is a phenomenon, not the ground. And if one starts with phenomenon, one may describe its form – but never grasp its nature. And the nature of consciousness, as experience shows, is not form, but the absence of any need for form. And it is precisely in this absence that its freedom resides. And it is this freedom that all structural models attempt to contain – turning it into a new cell, inhabited by a mind that fears emptiness more than death.

The conflict between structural models and the direct experience of consciousness is not a philosophical debate – it has practical consequences. As long as one believes the universe is a fractal, a hologram, or even «Brahma’s Dream,» one remains within the game – where one’s role is to explore, understand, conform. And this belief, even if it appears liberating, actually traps one in the cycle of seeking – because seeking implies lack. But in emptiness, there is no lack – only fullness that requires no search. And herein lies the central trap of all systems of knowledge, including science and spiritual teachings: they create the illusion that truth must be found, when in fact it is already here – requiring no effort, no structures, no understanding. It demands only the cessation of effort. And in this cessation lies the end of all models – including «Brahma’s Dream» and the fractal universe.

This cessation is not passivity. It is an act of supreme activity – because it requires abandoning the deepest habitual pattern: the habit of explanation. And in this relinquishment, consciousness returns to its primary state – indescribable, yet directly experiencable. And this experience is not a rare attainment – it is the norm, available to anyone who ceases clinging to the pain of loss and fear of emptiness. If this experience is available to all, then all books, all theories, all models are not guides – they are temporary crutches, meant to be discarded in order to walk alone. And to walk alone means to walk without a map. Truth is not a destination – it is the very act of discarding the map.

Modern science, in its pursuit of objectivity, ignores this fact. Yet even within its own framework, signs of a crisis in structural thinking are emerging. Karl Friston’s work on free energy shows that the brain does not reflect reality but constructs the least surprising model. If this model is all we call «reality,» then reality itself is a product of prediction. And if reality is a product of prediction, then all its structures – including fractals – are artifacts of a cognitive system striving to avoid uncertainty. The emptiness experienced in out-of-body states is precisely that uncertainty – the one the system fears most. And it is for this reason that it fabricates «Brahma’s Dream,» fractals, torsion fields – not to reveal truth, but to replace it with a comforting illusion.